On world scale, U.S. students average

Study: Europe, Asia report higher scores

by Nick Anderson - Dec. 8, 2010 12:00 AMWashington Post

After a decade of intensive efforts to improve its schools, the United States posted these results in a new global survey of 15-year-old student achievement: average in reading, average in science and slightly below average in math.

Those middling scores significantly lagged results from several countries in Europe and Asia in the report this week from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

South Korea is an emerging academic powerhouse. Finland and Singapore continue to flex their muscles. And the Chinese city of Shanghai, participating for the first time in the Program for International Student Assessment, topped the 2009 rankings of dozens of countries and a handful of subnational regions.

U.S. officials said the results show that the nation is slipping further behind its competitors despite years spent seeking to raise performance in reading and math through the 2002 No Child Left Behind law and a host of other reforms.

"For me, it's a massive wake-up call," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday. "Have we ever been satisfied as Americans being average in anything? Is that our aspiration? Our goal should be absolutely to lead the world in education."

The Obama administration is likely to use the results to press Congress next year to rewrite the federal education law to prod states to do more to help the lowest-performing schools.

Dozens of states have also approved new national academic standards that are meant to make U.S. schools more competitive.

On Monday in North Carolina, President Barack Obama warned that the United States faces a "Sputnik moment," needing innovations akin to the effort to put a man on the moon after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into orbit in 1957.

The 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, seeks to promote sustainable growth, world trade and higher living standards. Its testing program tracks the knowledge and problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds every three years.

The report released Tuesday focused on reading ability and found that more than a dozen countries, from South Korea to Poland, performed significantly better than the organization's statistical average in that area. The United States did not.

The U.S. scores of 500 in reading and 502 in science, on a 1,000-point scale, were about the organization's average, according to the report. The U.S. math score of 487 was below the average of 496.

Education experts cautioned that the strong marks for Shanghai, as well as those reported for Hong Kong, were not representative of education trends in China as a whole because the testing program did not canvass the entire country.

Still, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the testing program, called the results from Shanghai "stunning." He said it has been especially adept at moving talented educators into the most challenging assignments through career and pay incentives.

Among other key findings of the study:

- Girls outperform boys in reading in every participating country. The gender reading gap among the organization's members was equivalent to about 39 points on the testing scale, or a year of schooling.

- Countries with similar levels of economic prosperity can yield widely varying academic results. South Korea, the strongest performer among the group's member nations, has a lower gross domestic product per capita than the organization's average. So does Shanghai.

- U.S. math results were up since 2006 but not measurably different from scores in 2003, the earliest year in which comparisons were possible.